The Ruckus Society was founded in late 1995 by two giants of the radical environmentalist movement: Mike Roselle and Howard “Twilly” Cannon. Roselle was a founder of Earth First! (of 1980s tree-spiking fame), the group which spun off the domestic terrorist Earth Liberation Front in 1992. He also co-founded the radical Rainforest Action Network. Cannon built his extremist credentials as a front-line activist and ship’s captain with Greenpeace’s French and Russian anti-nuclear campaigns.
Ruckus is turning into a violent version of Forrest Gump, grooming the footsoldiers of the “protest industry” for every major newsworthy protest event since its founding. Activists descending on San Diego for the 2001 “biodevastation” demonstrations (railing against life-saving food technology) looked to Ruckus leaders for planning, logistics, media attention, and physical tactics. The same can be said for the massive and violent protests against Philadelphia’s 2000 Republican Convention, and the aggressive anti-World Bank demonstrations in Washington, DC, during that same year. In these two latter cases (as with Seattle), serious damage was done to private and public property alike. In Philadelphia alone, 23 police cars were damaged and 15 officers were injured.
Whether the target du jour is biotech foods, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, or globalization in general, the organization recruits, trains, transports, and houses the army of militants needed to earn media coverage and make life difficult for the rest of us. Some observers have even claimed that Ruckus paid protesters to show up in Seattle. Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, wrote that one protester there told a colleague, “Sorry, I’ve got to go. If I don’t get to the finish line of the march I don’t get paid.”
Ruckus itself has no problem getting paid, reaping six-figure grant awards from the likes of Ted Turner and the “caring capitalists” at Ben & Jerry’s. When the multinational corporation Unilever bought the ice cream maker in 2000, it agreed to continue Ben & Jerry’s bizarre flavor of philanthropy for the foreseeable future. The Turner foundation has also contributed heavily to Ruckus, including over $150,000 in grants made via The Ecology Center, Inc., a Montana group where Ruckus’ first slate of officers met in the mid-1990s.
Ruckus’s primary contributions to the activist agenda are its “action camps”: weeklong boot camps for leftist protesters, usually held a few weeks prior to a major organized demonstration. A few hundred young Ruckus recruits typically attend each camp, where they are trained in the finer points of “police confrontation strategies,” “street blockades,” “urban climbing & rappelling,” “using the media to your advantage,” and “learning to lock your head to something” (among other things). Predictably, food served at the activist camps is vegetarian all the way. One 1998 camp chef told The Washington Post that “people here have some serious views on food, but that’s to be expected.” A participant in the same event adamantly insisted to a CNN camera crew: “Absolutely no meat whatsoever; no meat products, by-products, whatsoever.”
If you’ve heard of Ruckus Society at all, it was probably in relation to the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. Americans watched in horror as organized hoodlums ran roughshod over the city’s commercial district, smashing windows, setting fires, overturning vehicles, ransacking a Starbucks coffee shop and a McDonald’s restaurant, and generally putting lives at risk. It’s no coincidence that the Ruckus Society staffers were in the middle of the melee, giving on-the-record quotes to national media figures. Nor was it an accident that Ruckus director John Sellers represented the protesters when the terms of their arrest were being negotiated with Seattle police. The Ruckus Society is generally credited with organizing the whole Seattle spectacle in the first place. When the dust had settled, Sellers smugly told USA Today, “We kicked the WTO’s butt all over the Northwest.”
Did you write that post on Ruckus yourself? I am asking because I am planning to write a letter to the editor of our local paper, The Bellingham Herald, and I may use some of your post. Please ping the Washington State group on this.
I thought that you were saying no to pinging the WA State group, until I clicked on the link. Thanks.
They have tried to build up a big mailing list so that they can quickly form a response mob.
New tactics include "random protests". They play phone tag or send out pager messages to meet in some place (like a public park) and do some apolitical joke gathering (like 50 people) and then quickly disperse. I think this is merely testing the waters to see what the response time is. There was at least one FR thread about this tactic.